Hurrah for IE 7 Beta 2 "refresh"
Two noteworthy events I picked up on while feed-reading this morning:
- There's a new IE 7 Beta out.
- Dave Shea had dinner with the IE team and reports the following CSS enhancements:
Floats, overflow, and the like? Fixed. Done. It’s over. No more inconsistency, it looks like that’s a wrap. We get min-width and max-width. Oh, joyous day.
It's the last bit about min/max width that I was really pleased to read. This is a big one for me and lots of others for that matter.
Finally I can start to think about a redesign for codestore.net. When I originally worked on this layout I was using min/max width, but opted out in favour of one-look-fits-all. If IE 7 starts to support these properties it will make huge changes to the way we design layouts. Fingers crossed everybody.
What about min/max height though? This is another much sought after enhancement for many designers. Is that there? I'm off to take a look.
Update: It all seems to work! Support for max/min width and height is there in the new "refresh" of Beta 2.
Here's a simple page I knocked together to test it.
This has made my day. It's good to see the market-leading browser finally catching up with the others. Soon we'll be able to design as we please for all browsers. Well, maybe.
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I'm a bit skeptic, as IE7 will only be available for XP SP2+ and Vista. Who uses them right now ? So far in the corporate environment i've only seen W2K workstation.. And lots of users do not want to install XP SP2 and just stick to SP1 because of the new EULA (which concerns DRM).
That is a false joy. I bet you will still code for IE6 for looonnnng months..
You're right YoGi, I'll be coding for IE6 for months, if not years to come. It's a shame, but at least there's a bright future.
While there are corporates who lag there are also those that lead the way and keep up-to-date.
It's anything but a false joy to me. It's a godsend.
At last Microsoft are getting their act together on the browser front, although it is still miles behind both Opera and Firefox in terms of functionality and usability!
Opera:
- True Tabbed Interface
- Mouse Gestures
- Voice Recognition
- CSS Compliance
- Saved Sessions
- Small Screen Rendering
- etc...
Firefox
- Open Source
- Plugins
- Developer Tools
- etc...
I have to say that i am an avid Opera user. It is so much slicker than all other browsers out there at the moment.
Microsoft have made a good step forward, but does it go far enough? I have yet to be convinced that it will win back lost users. It seems to be aimed at slowing the loss, instead of stopping it!
So there!
sPuD. It's not really about users is it. It's about business. Let's not forget that, as Domino developers, we spend all our time developing for the corporate environment. The only users IE has lost are the likes of us nerds who know better. Most users don't even know there's anything other than IE. IE is still the dominant force in the browser market and it's amazing to think they are listening to demands from us developers and getting their act together.
Jake.
You are right. They really do have the browser market sown up. That's a good and bad thing. Although, i think in the future they may yet lose out.
Have you checked out the news on Opera lately. It is providing, "Opera Mini", that all of the mobile phone companies are really starting to use. (Plus, it has been added to the Nintendo DS as the default Web Browser.). It is also making big headway into other devices, such as "IPTV", etc...
It's big selling point is that it's browser will run on any device (with the same functionality). Therefore you can write & test your pages in the normal browser and they will render the same on all other devices.
Anyway, being a nerd and optimist to the end, i hope they succeed with their "back-door" tactics and defeat the "behemoth" that is Microsoft!
So there!
The way I build pages these days is to build them for Firefox and then add an "ie.css" with conditional comments that overrides the normal styles with ones that work with IE6. What these changes to IE will hopefully mean is that it will be able to use the normal CSS file, but I will still have to make one for a few years for IE6.
FYI: These new CSS additions only work in standards-compliance mode. Unless you use the DominoCompleteDocType notes.ini parameter, this won't work.
Jack,
Can you tell more about DominoCompleteDocType? That's a new one for me.
Thanx.
Arno